Head in the Clouds

Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie recently announced that the company will be offering internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The platform is called Azure and will run Windows servers and the .Net framework in the cloud as a hosted, pay-as-you go service. It'll be part of what they're calling Live Services, and it'll run Live apps, .Net apps, SQL server, Sharepoint servers, and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM. With these developments, it appears that Microsoft is trying to move in the direction of Amazon’s Web Services and cloud computing initiatives from other enterprise IT players, including everyone from IBM to RackSpace. It may also be that they are moving away from the OS-on-a-box model in favor of cloud services. The writing is on the wall for Microsoft. They need to innovate quickly. Vista is not what they thought it would be. Instead, its turning out to be a good reason for people and companies to switch to the MacOS. If Microsoft gets any traction with cloud services on a broad market basis, then we may be increasing the world's dependency on ubiquitous network connectivities (and active subscriptions) as a prerequisite for even the most basic of interactions with computers and other devices. Such a scenario has its dangers since users of such services will need to have 'network' available to do anything. I'm not sure that such a scenario would be in most people's best interest.